Clocktower

Here is a link to my text message encoder.  It was designed with Python on Repl.it (a free online platform).

Here is a link to the new tkinter version.

I once did a project in a History of Mathematics class on the Enigma machine, a World War II encryption device, and how it's decryption helped the Allies overcome the Axis powers.  I learned the basics of how it worked for my class presentation, and the idea has fascinated me since.  While my enciphering machine may be less impressive than the Enigma, it is fully functional and can successfully encipher and decipher text messages.  My wife and I occasionally send each other secret messages over email during our lunches, and it works perfectly.

Due to the multifaceted gear-like method it works in, I gave it an equally mysterious and imposing name - Clocktower.

A simple cipher just slides the characters over a few positions.  A more complicated cipher can also jumble them slightly (non-randomly of course, so that the message can be deciphered).  Clocktower, however, works so that the character mapping is dependent on the position of the character in the overall message.  I was happy to see that the concepts I learned in Abstract Algebra I and II came in handy!

Recently, I remade clocktower into a tkinter app.  I enjoyed figuring out this new and powerful module!